Faith of the Fallen tsot-6

by Terry Goodkind

  “Killing is not. Jagang will be intent on killing you all.”

  “We know that, Zedd.” The general scratched his beard, his gaze darting back and forth between Verna and Zedd. “The Prelate and her Sisters have helped us with detecting a number of enemy scouts and such. Just the same as Sister Philippa, here, found you when you approached our camp, they’ve found others intent on harm. They’ve done their part, Zedd, and without complaint. Every soldier in this camp is glad to have them here.”

  “All well and good, but when the army of the Imperial Order attacks, it will be different. They will use the gifted to lay waste to your forces.”

  “They will try,” Verna insisted, trying to be convincing without shouting, which she was clearly itching to do, “but we are prepared to prevent such a thing.”

  “That’s right,” Warren said, nodding his confidence. “We have gifted at the ready at all times.”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” Zedd drawled, as if he might be reconsidering. “Then you have dealt with the simple threats. The albino mosquitoes and such.”

  General Reibisch’s bushy eyebrows wrinkled together. “The what?”

  Zedd waved his fork. “So, tell me, then just to satisfy my curiosity—what are the gifted planning to do when the enemy charges our forces? Say, with a line of cavalry?”

  “Lay down a line of fire before their cavalry,” Warren said without hesitation. “As they charge in, we’ll incinerate them before they can so much as launch a spear.”

  “Ah,” Zedd said. “Fire.” He put the last forkful in his mouth. Everyone silently watched him chew. He paused in his chewing and looked up. “Big fire, I presume? Colossal gouts of flame, and all?”

  “What mosquitoes is he talking about,” General Reibisch muttered under his breath toward Verna and Warren beside him on his bench opposite Zedd and Adie.

  “That’s right,” Verna said, ignoring the general. He sighed and folded his arms across his barrel chest. “A proper line of fire.”

  Verna waited until Zedd swallowed. “Do you find something unsatisfactory about that, First Wizard?”

  Zedd shrugged. “Well . . .” He paused, then frowned. He leaned toward the general, peering more closely. Zedd wagged a bony finger at the man’s folded arms.

  “There’s one now. A mosquito is about to suck your blood, General.”

  “What? Oh.” He swatted it. “They’ve been thick this summer. I think the season for them is drawing to an end, though. We’ll be happy to be rid of the little pests, I can tell you.”

  Zedd waggled his finger again. “And were they all like that one?”

  General Reibisch lifted his forearm and glanced down at the squashed bug. “Yes, the bloodthirsty little . . .” His voice trailed off. He peered more closely. With a finger and thumb he gingerly lifted the tiny insect by a wing, holding it up to have a better look.

  “Well I’ll be . . . this thing is”—his face lost a shade of color—“white.” His grayish-green eyes turned up toward Zedd. “What was that you were saying about . . . ?”

  “Albino mosquitoes,” Zedd confirmed as he set his empty plate on the ground. He gestured with a sticklike finger at the general’s flat assailant.

  “Have you ever seen the albino fever, General? Have any of you? Terrible thing, albino fever.”

  “What’s albino fever?” Warren asked. “I never heard of it. I’ve never read anything about it, either, I’m sure.”

  “Really? Must be just a Midlands thing.”

  The general peered more closely at the tiny white insect he was holding up. “What does this albino fever do to a person?”

  “Oh, your flesh turns the most ghastly white.” Zedd waved his fork. “Do you know,” he said, frowning in thought as if distracted by something as he looking up at the ceiling of the tent, “that I once saw a wizard lay down a simply prodigious font of flame before a line of charging cavalry?”

  “Well, there you go,” Verna said. “You know its value, then. You’ve seen it in action.”

  “Yes . . .” Zedd drawled. “Problem was, the enemy had been prepared for such a simple-minded trick.”

  “Simple-minded!” Verna shot to her feet. “I don’t see how you could possibly consider—”

  “The enemy had conjured curved shields just for such an eventuality.”

  “Curved shields?” Warren swiped back a curly lock of his blond hair.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing. What are curved—”

  “The wizard who laid down the fire had been expecting shields, of course, and so he made his fire resistant to such an expected defense. These shields, though, weren’t conjured to stop the fire”—Zedd’s gaze shifted from Warren’s wide eyes to Verna’s scowl—“but to roll it.”

  “Albino fever?” The general waved his bug. “If you might, could you explain—”

  “Roll the fire?” Warren asked as he leaned forward.

  “Yes,” Zedd said. “Roll the fire before the cavalry charge—so that instead of a simple cavalry assault, the defenders now had deadly fire rolling back at them.”

  “Dear Creator . . .” Warren whispered. “That’s ingenious—but surely the shield would extinguish the fire.”

  Zedd twirled his fork as he spoke, as if to demonstrate the shield rolling the flames. “Conjured by their own wizard for the expected defense, the fire had been hardened against shields, so instead of fizzling, it stayed viable. That, of course, enabled the curved shield to roll the fire back without it extinguishing. And, of course, being hardened to shields, the wizard’s own quickly thrown up defensive shields couldn’t stop his own fire’s return.”

  “But he could just cut it oft!” Warren was becoming panicked, as if seeing his own wizard’s fire coming back at him. “The wizard who created it could call it and cut it off.”

  “Could he?” Zedd smiled. “He thought so, too, but he hadn’t been prepared for the peculiar nature of the enemy’s shield. Don’t you see? It not only rolled the fire back, but in so doing rolled around the fire as it went, protecting it from any alteration by magic.”

  “Of course . . .” Warren whispered to himself.

  “The shield was also sprinkled with a provenance-seeking spell, so it rolled the fire back toward the wizard who conjured it. He died by his own fire—after it had seared through hundreds of his own men on its way to him.”

  Silence settled into the tent. Even the general, still holding out the albino mosquito, sat transfixed.

  “You see,” Zedd finally went on, tossing his fork down onto his plate, “using the gift in war is not simply an act of exercising your power, but an act of using your wits.”

  Zedd pointed. “For example, consider that albino mosquito General Reibisch is holding. Under cover of darkness, just like right now, tens of thousands of them, conjured by the enemy, could be sneaking into this camp to infect your men with fever, and no one would even realize they were under attack. Then, in the morning, the enemy strikes a camp of weak and sick soldiers and slaughters the lot of you.”

  Sister Philippa, over on the other side of Adie, swished her hand in alarm at a tiny buzzing mosquito. “But, the gifted we have could counter such a thing.” It was more a plea than an argument.

  “Really? It’s difficult to detect such an infinitesimal bit of magic. None of you detected these minuscule invaders, did you?”

  “Well, no, but . . .”

  Zedd fixed a fierce glare on Sister Philippa. “It’s night. In the night, they simply seem to be ordinary mosquitoes, pesky, but no different from any other. Why, the general here didn’t notice them. Neither did any of you gifted people. You can’t detect the fever they carry, either, because it, too, is such a tiny speck of magic you aren’t watching for it—you’re looking for something huge and powerful and fearsome.

  “Most of the gifted Sisters will be bitten in their sleep, without ever knowing it happened, until they awake in the pitch blackness with the shivering chills of a frightful fever, only to disco
ver the first truly debilitating symptom of this particular fever: blindness. You see, it isn’t the blackness of night they awake to—dawn has already broken—but blindness. Then they find that their legs won’t obey their wishes. Their ears are ringing with what sounds like an endless, tingling scream.”

  The general’s gaze darted about, testing his eyesight as Zedd went on.

  He twisted a big finger in an ear as if to clean it out.

  “By now, anyone bitten is too weak to stand. They lose control of their bodily functions and lie helpless in their own filth. They are within hours of death . . . but those last hours will seem like a year.”

  “How do we counter it?” On the edge of his seat, Warren licked his lips. “What’s the cure?”

  “Cure? There is no cure! Now a fog is beginning to creep toward the camp. This time, the few gifted left can sense that the wide mass of seething murk is foul with dark, suffocating magic. They warn everyone. Those too sick to stand wail in terror. They can’t see, but they can hear the distant battle cries of the advancing enemy. In a panic not to be touched by the deadly fog, anyone able to rise from their bedrolls does so. Too delirious to stand, a few manage to crawl. The rest run for their lives before the advancing fog.

  “It’s the last mistake they ever make,” Zedd whispered. He swept a hand out before their white faces. “They run headlong into the horror of a waiting death trap.”

  Everyone was wide-eyed and slack-jawed by now, sitting on the edge of their benches.

  “So, General,” Zedd said in a bright, cheery tone as he sat back, “what about those mass graves? Or are you planning on any of you left alive just abandoning the sick for dead and leaving the bodies to rot? Probably not a bad idea. There will be enough to worry about without the burdensome task of trying to care for the dying and burying all the dead—especially since the very act of touching their white flesh will contaminate the living with a completely unexpected sickness, and then—”

  Verna shot to her feet. “But what can we do!” She could plainly see the potential for chaos all around her. “How can we counter such vile magic?”

  She threw open her arms. “What do we need to do?”

  Zedd shrugged. “I thought you and your Sisters had it all figured out. I thought you knew what you were doing.” He waggled his hand over his shoulder, gesturing off to the south, toward the enemy. “I thought you said you had the situation well in hand.”

  Verna silently sank back down to the bench beside Warren.

  “Uh, Zedd . . .” General Reibisch swallowed in distress. He held out the mosquito. “Zedd, I think I’m starting to feel dizzy. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “About what?”

  “The fever. I think my vision is getting dimmer. Can you do nothing?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, because there’s nothing wrong with you. I just conjured a few albino mosquitoes to make a point. The point is that what I saw when I came into this camp scared the wits out of me. If the gifted among the enemy are at all diabolical, and with Jagang we have ample reason to believe they are, then this army is ill prepared for the true nature of the threat.”

  Sister Philippa haltingly lifted a hand like a schoolgirl with a question. “But, with all the gifted among us, surely, we would . . . know . . . or something.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you: the way things are now, you won’t know. It’s the things you never heard of, haven’t seen before, don’t expect, and can’t even imagine, that are going to be coming for you. The enemy will use conventional magic, to be sure, and that will be trouble enough, but it’s the albino mosquitoes you must fear.”

  “As you said, though, you only conjured them to make a point,” Warren said. “Maybe the enemy isn’t as smart as you, and won’t think of such things.”

  “The Order did not take over all of the Old World by being stupid but by being ruthless.” Zedd’s brow drew lower. He lifted a finger skyward to mark his words. “Besides, they have already thought of just such things. This past spring, one of the Sisters in the hands of the enemy used magic to unleash a deadly plague that could not be detected by anyone with the gift. Tens of thousands of people, from newborn infants to the old, suffered gruesome deaths.”

  Those Sisters, in the hands of the enemy, were a grave and ever-present danger. Ann had gone off alone on a mission to either rescue those Sisters or eliminate them. From what Zedd had seen when he had been down in Anderith, Ann had failed in her mission. He didn’t know what had become of her, but he knew that Jagang still held Sisters captive.

  “But we stopped the plague,” Warren said.

  “Richard stopped it, as only he could.” Zedd held the gaze of the young wizard. “Did you know that in order to save us from that grim fate, he had to venture to the Temple of the Winds, hidden away beyond the veil of life in the underworld itself? Neither you nor I can imagine the toll such an experience must have taken on him. I saw a shadow of the specter in his eyes when he spoke of it.

  “I can’t even hazard a guess as to how trifling a chance at success he had when he started on so hopeless a journey. Had he not prevailed against all odds, we would all be dead by now from an unseen death brought on by magic we could not detect and could not counter. I’d not want to again count on such an auspicious deliverance.”

  No one could disagree with him; they nodded slightly, or looked away.

  The tent had become a gloomy place.

  Verna rubbed her fingers across her brow. “Pride is of no use to the dead. I admit it: those gifted among us have little knowledge of what we’re doing when it comes to using our gift in warfare. We know some things about fighting, perhaps even a great many things, but I admit we could be woefully lacking in the depth of knowledge needed.

  “Think us fools if you will, but don’t ever think us at odds with you, Zedd; we are all here on the same side.” Her brown eyes betrayed nothing but simple sincerity. “We not only could use your help, we would gratefully welcome it.”

  “Of course he will help us,” Adie scoffed while giving Zedd a scolding frown.

  “Well, you have a good start. Admitting that you don’t know something is the first step to learning.” Zedd scratched his chin. “Every day, I amaze myself with all I don’t know.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Warren said. “If you would help us, I mean.”

  He sounded hesitant, but forged ahead anyway. “I would really like to have the benefit of a real wizard’s experience.”

  Despondent with the weight of his other troubles, Zedd shook his head.

  “I would like to—and to be sure I will give you all some advice in the task at hand. However, I’ve been on a long and frustrating journey, and I’m afraid I’m not yet finished with it. I can’t stay. I must soon be off again.”

  Chapter 17

  Warren swiped back his curly blond hair. “What sort of journey have you been on, Zedd?”

  Zedd pointed a bony finger. “You don’t need to keep that flattened mosquito, General.”

  General Reibisch realized it was still between his finger and thumb. He tossed it away. Everyone awaited Zedd’s words. He smoothed the heavy maroon robes over his twiglike thighs as his gaze absently studied the dirt floor.

  He let out a crestfallen sigh. “I was recovering from my own auspicious deliverance from grappling with remarkable magic I’d never before encountered, and, as I regained my senses, spent months searching. I was down in Anderith, and saw some of what happened after the Order swept in there. It was a dark time for the people. Not only from the rampaging soldiers, but also from one of your Sisters, Verna. Death’s Mistress they called her.”

  “Do you know which one it is?” Verna asked in a bitter voice at hearing of a Sister causing harm.

  “No. I only saw her once, from a goodly distance. Had I been fully recovered, I might have tried to remedy the situation, but I wasn’t myself yet and dared not confront her. She also ha
d a few thousand soldiers with her. The sight of all the soldiers, led by a woman they had heard of and feared, had people in a panic. The Sister was young, with blond hair. She wore a black dress.”

  “Dear Creator,” Verna whispered. “Not one of mine—one of the Keeper’s. There are few women born with the strength of power such as she has. She also has power acquired by nefarious means; Nicci is a Sister of the Dark.”

  “I’ve gotten reports,” General Reibisch said. By his grim tone, Zedd knew the reports must have had it right. “I’ve heard, too, that it’s quieted considerably.”

  Zedd nodded. “The Order was at first brutal, but now ‘Jagang the Just’—as they have taken to calling him—has spared them further harm. In most places, other than the capital of Fairfield where the most killing took place, people have turned to supporting him as a liberator come to deliver them into a better life. They’re reporting neighbors, or travelers—whoever they suspect is not an adherent to the noble ideals of the Order.

  “I was all through Anderith, and spent a good deal of time behind the enemy lines searching—without success. I then journeyed up into the wilds and north to a number of towns, and even a few cities, but I can find no sign of them. I guess my abilities were a long time in recovering; I only a short time ago discovered where you all were. I have to commend you, General, you’ve kept the presence of your forces well hidden—took me forever to find your army. The boy, though, seems to have vanished without a trace.”

  Zedd’s fists tightened in his lap. “I must find him.”

  “You mean Richard?” Adie asked. “You be searching for your grandson?”

  “Yes. For Richard and Kahlan, both.” Zedd lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “However, without any success, I must admit. I’ve talked to no one who has seen even a sign of them. I’ve used every skill I possess, but to no avail. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they no longer existed.”

  Looks passed among everyone else. Zedd peered from one surprised face to another. For the first time in months, Zedd’s hopes rose. “What? What is it? You know something?”